Corina has to live with a range of characters, including a man she calls Drop Dead Fred. Photo: Ginger GormanSource:Supplied

ONE morning Corina woke up and heard a female voice narrating everything she did in the third person: “She’s going to the toilet. She’s having a shower. She’s cleaning her teeth.”

While Corina didn’t recognise the voice, it felt as if this woman was in the same room. Except of course that she wasn’t.

“It was a very strange experience,” Corina says, “at that stage I couldn’t make any sense of it.”

Initially the voice 44-year-old Corina first heard back in November 2012 wasn’t a negative one, so she decided to “just put up with it, basically.”

But things were about to get much harder.

“By March the following year I had three voices, and visions as well,” Corina says.

“I had a female voice which was really derogatory and abusive. I had a male voice, which demanded I do random tasks. I had a another female voice which was the voice of a Buddhist nun,” she explains.

The voice that set Corina tasks would say things like: “Empty out the linen cupboard and repack it.”

“Initially I didn’t do it. I just thought he was just being silly, but later on I found that it had a purpose,” she says.

Perhaps the most alarming of her visitors is a character Corina calls “Drop Dead Fred” who manifests as “a visual hallucination that I get, where people I’m looking at turn into skeletons and I see all their innards and gizzards.”

The voices and hallucinations had such an impact on day-to-day life, that she was forced to give up studying event management.

“Sixty per cent of the time I had the voices just going off. That took all my effort just to address them.

“I ended up in hospital, and from there I started getting the help that I needed,” Corina says.

Kath Sellick is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Social Work at the University of Melbourne. She’s been working with voice hearers for seven years.

Both Corina and Ms Sellick presented sessions on voice hearing at the mental health focused “TheMHS Conference,” in Canberra this week.

Ms Sellick says “between two and eight per cent of the general population have at some point heard voices external to themselves.”

Based on this, up to 1.9 million Australians or 1 in 13 people have experienced voice hearing.

Despite its prevalence, Ms Sellick says people find it “shameful” to discuss because it’s “very stigmatised.”

Traditionally, she explains, “mainstream psychiatry tries to get rid of voices and it usually does so through medications.”

She points out that long-term use of antipsychotic drugs can have serious side effects and may not actually fix the problem.

This is where the so-called “Hearing Voices Approach” comes in. Developed in the Netherlands in the late 1980s, it stems from the belief that the voices have meaning to the person hearing them and that it’s possible to find strategies to cope.

A key facet of learning to live with the voices, Ms Sellick says, is “actually engaging with them” because then “you can get a better sense of what they represent in your life.”

Giving the example of voice-hearing man and mental health advocate Ron Coleman who was sexually abused as a child, Ms Sellick explains: “One of his voices was of his abuser.”

“The research is suggesting that there is certainly a link between trauma, such as childhood sexual abuse, and psychosis.

Corina is a case-in-point. She suffered abuse as a child at the hands of a family friend and suffers from PTSD because of it.

“The guilt and the shame’s probably the hardest part that I had to learn to deal with, and that’s still a work in progress,” she says.

Reflecting on the voices she started hearing nearly 30 years after the abuse took place, Corina is certain they are “a manifestation of unresolved emotion.”

Luckily, she happened upon a “liberal” psychologist who was willing to embark “on this journey together.”

Corina believes not all mental health professionals are so open-minded.

“At times they can be very quick to put someone in a box and label them, rather than looking at the underlying cause,” she says.

According to data emerging from Ms Sellick’s research, mental health professionals may neglect to ask their voice-hearing clients if they have suffered past trauma.

“Thirty per cent of mental health professionals said that they do regularly ask voice hearers about trauma, which means that 70 per cent aren’t regularly asking,” she says.

Corina, who is heavily involved in support group Hearing Voices Network WA, urges other voice hearers to “have hope that recovery is possible.”

However she also makes it clear that “recovery” doesn’t necessarily mean the voices ever go away.

“It’s not about getting rid of the voices, but changing the relationship with them. Changing the balance power away from the voices and back to yourself,” Corina says.

Corina has found it helps to engage with the voices, rather than get rid of them. Photo: Ginger GormanSource:Supplied

This is exactly the point she has come to her own life. She understands who all her voices are and how they help “make sense” of her trauma. Each voice even has a name.

Aside from Drop Dead Fred, Corina tells me there’s Silvia who is mean and critical, Norjin the Buddhist nun, Jonathan the taskmaster and Jack — a character who Corina originally thought “was trying to kill me” but now acts as a mentor.

While dealing with the voices in public can sometime be tough, Corina uses meditation and conversation techniques to deal with the intruders.

“I feel I’m in control. I’m no longer threatened or frightened by the voices,” she says.